I don't really know what Sony wants with this, but they're using GNUstep, so that's something, I guess. "Sony's Networked Application Platform is a project designed to leverage the open source community to build and evolve the next generation application framework for consumer electronic devices. The developer program gives access to a developer community and resources like SDK, tools, documentation and other developers. The foundation upon which this project is base comes from the GNUstep community, whose origin dates back to the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT Computer Inc (now Apple Computer Inc.). While Apple has continued to update their specification in the form of Cocoa and Mac OS X, the GNUstep branch of the tree has diverged considerably."

I guess Sony looked at the iPhone, iPad etc. and could see if it works on them, it could work for them too.

To be honest, this is a very big surprise, I thought GNUstep was one of the really nice projects that are tucked away in the corner of the huge warehouse full of projects. Lets hope this boosts it out of relative obscurity.